Portrait of the Irish Senator as a Gay Activist The man responsible for reversing Ireland’s repressive antigay laws will perform his one-man James Joyce show as part of the Houston International Festival by Alan Davidson and Ann Sieber

As part of the Houston International Festival’s focus on Ireland this year, the I-Fest is bringing to Houston a most remarkable man, who has been one of the major factors in promoting gay rights in Ireland over the past 30 years.

The first openly gay person ever to be elected to public office in Ireland, Senator David Norris was the driving force behind the repeal of Ireland’s laws against what they termed "buggery." He and some friends founded a group called the Irish Gay Rights Movement in 1974, which operated a gay disco by night, and worked for gay rights by day in offices above the disco, all while Norris was a professor at Trinity University and a member of Parliament. As if this weren’t diverse enough for one human being, while in Houston, Norris will be performing his one-man show Do You Hear What I Am Seeing?, in which he dons white suit, dark glasses, and cane and channels author James Joyce–based on his avid studies of Ireland’s favorite son as chairman of Dublin’s James Joyce Cultural Centre.

An articulate sharp-witted man, Senator Norris started our conversation by giving a rousing overview of Ireland’s repressive laws against gays through the years.

Ireland inherited the British laws against homosexuality, which were first put into the criminal courts when Henry VIII took over jurisdiction from the ecclesiastical courts, with the punishment for the crime being death. This English law did not extend into Ireland until a Bishop James Aperton decided to exploit antigay sentiment, and successfully campaigned to have the law extended into Ireland. "But he was more successful than he perhaps wanted," Norris explained with black glee, "because on Christmas Day 1640, having been found guilty of the abominable crime of buggery himself, he was hung by the neck until dead outside Christ Church Cathedral."

The wretched law stayed on the books for centuries, the punishment being reduced to life imprisonment in 1861 (which, in modified form, was the law under which Oscar Wilde was sentenced).

"So that is the context in which I was brought up," Norris said. "There were a few people who were known to be gay, although the word wouldn’t have been used."

In the early ’70s, Norris got involved in a Southern Irish civil rights association, "and it suddenly struck me that we were being very self-congratulatory in the South in trying to suggest that there was no discrimination, but we were a very homogenous society: Everyone was assumed to be white, heterosexual, Republican, and Catholic. Well, I was white, but I wasn’t heterosexual, I wasn’t particularly Republican, and I was an Anglican."

That’s when he and some friends formed a group to campaign specifically for gay rights, which they decided to call the Irish Gay Rights Movement. "By putting that out front, we would deal with one problem, which was that the majority of people thought that that was a paradox, that it was impossible, that the two things were mutually exclusive and contradictory–you could not be both Irish and gay."

When they started their discotheque/political organization, "we were amazed at the number of people who came," he said. "This was a way of harnessing energy for the infant gay movement. It gave an outlet for the social life of gay people in a community where there was absolutely no social life for gays at all. And we could raise the funds necessary to launch a political campaign."

Norris became the natural leader because he was one of the few people who felt safe being out. "I was employed by Trinity, which was the old university started by Queen Elizabeth I to convert the Irish to Anglicanism, and civilize them, and all that sort of thing. So it was supposed to be liberal. Also, both of my parents had been dead for quite some time. So, I had quite a bit of room to maneuver." Norris encountered opposition from within the group, which became divided between those who wanted to be a political organization, and those who wanted to serve as a social outlet. "So I said, ‘That’s grand, I don’t have to run discos anymore,’ and I started a new thing, which I called the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform."

Although he said this august-sounding entity mostly consisted of half a drawer in his filing cabinet at the university, he was able to recruit some highly placed friends, none of whom were gay, to join a patrons committee and he could put them on his letterhead. This tactic met with tremendous success, he said, "because the extreme right-wing Catholic groups got into a panic when they saw the notepaper, and we were denounced from a height as being a front for an international conspiracy funded by Jewish money from America." He laughed heartily. "It was great fun, because it gave us a credibility that we otherwise would never have had. And once we started being taken seriously, we started putting out press statements."

Given this momentum, Norris sued the state of Ireland, saying that the sodomy laws were against the constitution. Although he lost in the high court, he gained an important forum for opening minds, because he brought in witnesses from all over the world, including the then-president of the Amerian Psychiatric Association. The judge said he accepted their evidence that there was a "surprisingly" large number of gay people in Ireland–although they were invisible–and that they were not mentally retarded, nor were they less intelligent than the general population, nor were they child molesters. Nevertheless, the judge said that "because of the Christian and democratic nature of the state and the constitution, he had to find against me," Norris reported. When the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, it likewise upheld the antigay laws.

Norris then took the case to the European Court of Human Rights, taking as his lawyer Mary Robinson, who is now the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, and who had been a friend from college. She was able to win the case in 1993.

At first the Irish government dragged their feet in putting it into Irish law, and tried to put in an amendment that would have made the age of consent higher for gays than for heterosexuals. To counter this, Norris contacted a woman who was then a powerful backroom political figure and who had a gay son; he arranged for her to meet with the cabinet minister of justice, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, "as one mother to another."

"I think it was that kind of human understanding," Norris said. "Maire, who had four sons, she felt that any of them might turn out to be gay, and what kind of world would she be delivering them into?... And she refused to accept the amendment, and she made a splendid speech saying that in the Irish Republic, she as a cabinet minister would require clear, cogent, and convincing arguments and evidence to compel her to introduce discrimination against any citizen, and it had not been introduced by the opposition.... It was really on that basis that we got a really civilized law."

Nowadays, as a senator, Norris said his attention is not primarily on gay issues, but more on local issues like urban transport and international issues of human rights. However, because he’s built such credibility in other areas, when he does speak out on gay issues, he finds many more people are likely to listen to him than if he was a one-issue politician, especially when he’s invited to travel to many countries around the world where conditions for gay people are quite grim.

"Because I am on the bureau of the foreign affairs committee," he said, "I’m asked to visit places that normally I would not get to. And certainly people with an interest in gay rights would not get there. Places like, for example, Tehran, where I’ve had quite open and direct confrontations and arguments with people like the foreign minister and the president on the subject of gay rights.... And also recently in Iraq, and India, places like that. So it means I am able to go there and say things that other people cannot risk their lives to say. Because I come from outside the country, I have the opportunity to raise these issues and at least make these people aware that there are outside sources bearing witness to the discriminations and humiliations."

Senator David Norris will be in town as part of the Houston International Festival’s spotlight on Ireland. I-Fest and the University of Houston Theater Department present Senator David Norris and his show Do You Hear What I Am Seeing? Thursday, April 19, at 8 p.m., at the UH School of Theater. (Call 713/654-8808, ext. 400; $7 tickets available at the door.) Senator Norris will then kick off I-Fest as grand marshal of the International Artists’ Parade on Sat., April 21, noon. That same Saturday, he will join local celebrities, academics, and actors in a marathon reading of Joyce’s Ulysses, 2—6 p.m. in the auditorium of the Julia Ideson Library (located in Chase’s Emerald Isle in the Heart of the Festival, across from the downtown library). The Houston International Festival will be Fri., April 20—Sun., Apr. 29; see their website at www.ifest.org for complete information.